The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the second alpha
release of the K Desktop Environment. This release comes straight out of Glasgow,
the largest city in Scotland where aKademy is currently taking place.
Hundreds of KDE hackers are working like crazy to hunt down bugs, complete features
for KDE 4.0 and sit together developing and finishing new and exciting applications
for the new major version of the leading Free Desktop.

The most exciting new development is currently going on inPlasma, KDE 4's new shell for the desktop.
Plasma provides krunner, an application to directly launch programs and start other
tasks. Plasmoids are applets that display information such as the time, information about hardware
devices and also provide access to online resources, for example
showing RSS feeds, images or providing dictionary lookup.

System Settings, the replacement for kcontrol is an improved user interface hosting various modules for
configuring the desktop and other aspects of the system is another addition worth mentioning.

The upcoming weeks will be spent on further stabilizing and streamlining the underlying
KDE libraries to provide a stable interface for programmers for the whole KDE4 lifecycle.
Furthermore, the focus will shift to finishing the applications that are shipped with
the base desktop and polishing their user interfaces.

The end of July will see a full freeze of the kdelibs module, manifested in the first
beta release of KDE 4.0 with the final release currently planned for the end of October this year.

For the bravehearts who want to try KDE 4.0 Alpha2, please refer tothe alpha 2 info page
to find ways to have a peak at the current status yourself. As the pace of development
would outdate screenshots very quickly, the best way to find out about progress is to
refer to sites such as The Dot orPlanet KDE, the collection of KDE developers' weblogs.

Judging from the date of the files and the date at which KDE Alpha2 packages were tagged and created (which is the important date unlike the date of the announcement), this definitively likely to be the alpha2 CD.

Kicker will be replaced by a Plasma plasmoid app (at least this is the plan).
But Plasma is kind of late in the schedule for KDE4, but the good news it that it seems like it's libraries don't need much changes and work is focusing on plasmoids. This means that freeze won't be that much of a problem for Plasma and development will continue to be seen in newer versions od KDE4.

I'm just playing around with alpha 2 in a VM and I'm really impressed! The first alpha was nearly unusable slow for me and crashed all the time. Alpha 2 is much, much better.

The programs show really nice improvements compared to KDE3.x, Oxygen looks just beautiful and I really like the little animations in Dolphin (zooming of icon size preview, fading of status messages) or Konsole (themes sliding in).

And everything including Plasma is very fast and responsive - in a virtual machine without any 3D acceleration and without compositing.

Systemsettings - this is the one that Kubuntu currently uses, is that correct? It took a bit of getting used to after years of KControl for me but I can see that it is probably better for someone coming to it new. Also, there are the other reasons as discussed on the mailig list

Someone over at the ubuntuforums.org raised some good points where System Settings is inferior to KControl Since I generally agree I'll just paste them here:

1) KControl displays widgets much better in any screen size. System settings responds to a smaller screen size by always adding scrollbars, instead of resizing the widgets. (see Screenshot #1 style.png). This even happens on my relatively large 1280x800 display, so it certainly isn't good on even smaller displays.(see screenshot #2 size.png).

2) KControl has a much more intuitive way of managing oversized modules. It places the module within a scroll bar, but places the Apply/Cancel buttons outside, ensuring that they are always available. This is much smarter than system settings, which scrolls everything including the buttons(see screenshot #3 search.png).

3) While System Settings has a decent search function, which tells you which categories the results are in, the Kcontrol one is a lot better. It allows you to load several modules to see which result you want, while keeping the search results active. While system settings can do this, you need to go back and forth to achieve the same result.

But I think (hope) that now it is in the KDE svn those issues will be solved because usually KDE software is of very high quality also in regard to keyboard control (unlike unfortunately the software added to kubuntu which is not in default KDE).

I didn't code any of this or greatly follow it's creation, but my interpretation is that the System Settings changes were motivated by a very rare situation. That being: usability is not the primary concern of a computer settings editor, discoverability is.

High usability apps are usually somewhat difficult to learn (look at any professional tool and how many shortcuts it has that aren't obvious, most of the Adobe suite comes to mind). The general settings for a desktop are very rarely edited, so having it not done in the exact minimum time-frame is not a large overall penalty.

In real use, a settings editor is only used periodically and often when it is being used it is being used by a first-time user, or at least by a user who has never done what he is looking to do before. You usually only have to touch a specific setting once or twice before it's right, not every few days.

Because of this, a 'well designed' settings editor might be a little cumbersome to an experienced user, because the improvements to discoverability slow them down. I think that's the main reason that, when the interface is improved overall, this particular tool can take what many see as a back-step.

So, keep in mind not only how much the changes effect you, and also how much the changes will affect inexperienced users, as they're the ones most affected by the interface of this module.

As with previous alphas, the core components (kdelibs4, kdepimlibs and kdebase4) are packaged for FC6 and F7 in the kde-redhat unstable repository. Those packages are designed to be safe to use in a KDE 3 environment: they install to /opt/kde4 and save settings in ~/.kde4.

PS: The main goal of the FC6 and F7 packages is to allow developers to port applications to KDE 4 (or write new ones). Running a full KDE 4 desktop with all components upgraded to the KDE 4 versions is the goal for Fedora 8.

Indeed - there is some division in Glasgow (and other places still) along sectarian lines, although never anywhere near as bad as used to be in Northern Ireland. Rangers v Celtic (football clubs) corresponds - or used to - to Protestant v Catholic.

I don't doubt that the original post is intended as a lighthearted joke and I think for most people in Scotland/UK it would be seen as such.

The status is that it hasn't been ported, and that, unfortunately, no one is working on it currently, that was an issue raised at a talk about deploying KDE on installation with more than 1000 computers, so maybe someone will stand up and take the job.

When the fallout from Akademy has cleared, come on over to #plasma on irc.freenode.net. It's a bit hectic and disorganised at the moment, but a few people have successfully managed to make their own. Good luck!